5. State power is inevitable, failure to seize it allows forces of privatization to isolate and destroy autonomous resistance

(Alex,EuropeanStudies@King’s, A Debate between John Holloway and Alex Callinicos: “Can we change the world without taking power?” World Social Forum, Porto Alegre (27 January 2005) https://web.archive.org/web/20110726172523/http://archive.iire.org/pamphlet_nsf_2006.pdf )

Whatever our differences, John and I stand for changing the world through a process of self-emancipation, where there aren’t leaders who tell people what to do but rather people who collectively liberate themselves. I admire the honesty, clarity and consistency of John’s work, which is evident in his presentation today. But I also have to be honest and say that I find the ideal of changing the world without taking power ultimately self-refuting. I agree with John about uncertainty. There are lots of things we cannot know. But one thing I am certain about. That is that it is impossible to change the world without addressing and solving the question of political power. I absolutely sympathise with one of the impulses behind the slogan ‘Change the world without taking power’. Among a lot of the traditions on the left worldwide there has been what has been called ‘socialism from above’. Whether it is a Communist party with Stalinist traditions or a social democratic party like the Workers Party in Brazil today, it involves the idea that the party changes things for you and everyone else remains passive. The political tradition I stand in is a very different one. It is that of socialism from below summed up in Marx’s definition of socialism as the self-emancipation of the working class. Socialism is about the oppressed and exploited of the world effectively liberating themselves. My fundamental difference with John is that I believe this process of self-emancipation requires us to confront and overthrow the existing state and replacing it with a radically different form of state power. John invites us essentially to turn our backs on the state. He says that we should carry out what he calls an ‘interstitial’ revolution. It’s been summed up by other thinkers sharing the same ideas as John as life despite capitalism. We should all try and cultivate our autonomous gardens despite the horrors of capitalism. The trouble is that the state won’t leave us alone and that is because capitalism itself, the system that different states sustain, won’t leave us alone. Capitalism today is invading the gardens of the world to carve them up and turn them into branches of agribusiness or suburban speculation and won’t leave us alone. We cannot ignore the state, because the state is the most concentrated single form of capitalist power. This means strategically we have to be against the state, to pursue the revolution against the state. Does this mean we ignore the existing state and do not ever put demands on the capitalist state? No. The existing capitalist states try to legitimise themselves to win the consent of those they oppress and exploit. This means that if we organise effectively, we can force reforms out of capitalism. Also, if we ignore the state, that means we will be indifferent to struggles over privatisation. For example, at the minute George Bush wants to privatise the pensions system in the US. Do we say we don’t care about that because the social security system in the US is organised by the state? I think, no. Finally, many workers these days are employed by the state. Part of the process of privatisation means those employees of private companies replace these workers. Often that means the service to the public is worse and the conditions and wages of those employed by those companies get worse. But if we are not indifferent to the state, that does not mean we can rely on it. In the long run capitalism and the state which seeks to sustain it will seek to take back any reforms it concedes temporarily. That is what they are seeking to do at the present time. Moreover, as John has highlighted, the state is a hierarchical organisation which organises violence to keep the mass of society subordinated. This means we cannot simply try to seize the existing state. If we seize the existing state, in the end, at the worst we will get Stalin, at best we will get someone like Lula or Mbeki in South Africa who comes out of a mass movement which seeks to change the world but ends up administering things for capitalism. What’s the alternative then? It is to build up a movement that is powerful and focused enough to break the existing forms of state power and institute radically different and radically democratic forms of state power. In other words, there has to be a revolution which is not a party taking state power by seizing the existing state, but the oppressed and exploited-above all workers-who break the existing state and in the process of doing so create radically new and democratic forms of power in order to manage society for themselves. This alternative is not just a fantasy that I’ve spun out of my head. If we look at the history of the working class movement over the last 150 years, again and again workers have created new ways of organising in order to wage mass struggles effectively. These have been much more democratic, much more subject to the control of the workers themselves. In order to wage their struggles, they have created delegate structures that break down the hierarchy that John talks about. And in doing so they have created new forms of political power, even if they don’t know it. There are many examples: the soviets in the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 are the most famous examples; there were the workers’ and soldiers’ councils that were formed in the German Revolution of 1918-20; right up to the cordones that were formed in Chile in 1972-73 at the height of the struggles under the Popular Unity government of Allende. There are many other examples of mass popular organisation that represent a new sort of political power. The important thing about these forms of organisation, whatever the intentions that led to their formation, is that they have the capacity to challenge and break the existing state and institute new forms of power. We are not saying, as John was suggesting, ‘Wait for the revolution.’ But any struggles that begin to build towards self-organisation are pointing the way towards the way a future non-capitalist, socialist, society can be organised. The problem is that for any movement towards self-organisation to succeed in breaking the power of capital, there has to be a moment of concentration and centralisation. You can’t deal with the concentrated power of capital-the state and the multinational corporations-without the movements themselves becoming focused to confront the power of those corporations directly. John will say, ‘When you talk about centralisation and concentration, you are returning to the old ways of organising, you are beginning to organise in a way that reproduces the centralised and hierarchical structures of the existing state.’ I agree it isn’t easy. John was very honest and talked about the difficulties with his strategic conception, and I agree there are difficulties with the approach I am defending. Combining centralisation with self-organisation is not easy. But without a degree of centralisation we will be defeated. If we simply have fragmented and decentralised and localised activity, all cultivating our autonomous gardens, capital can isolate us and destroy or incorporate us piece by piece. And we cannot address problems like climate change unless we have the capacity to coordinate and, to a degree, to centralise for global change. We cannot reduce CO2 emissions to the necessary level without global coordination. We will not achieve the world we want to see if we simply rely on the fragment and the local. This is related to the question of parties. John is critical of the party as a form of organisation. He says it reproduces the hierarchical structures of the existing state. But if we look at our movement, there are parties within the movement-that is, there are ideologically organised currents which have in their different ways a total strategic view of the transformation of society. In that sense of party, John and the people who think like him are as much a party within the different movements as are the Workers Party and the PSOL in Brazil,1 or the Socialist Workers Party in Britain. 1: The new left wing party formed by those expelled from the Workers Party. People who organise such a current can say they are not a party, but it is a form of self-deception. Recognising the role parties can play in the movements can lead to a more honest and open articulation of different strategies and visions for change. Parties can contribute to the development of a movement that is both self-organised and sufficiently coherent to take on the task of social transformation, of revolution. My ideal in this respect is the one articulated by the great Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci. He talked about the dialectical interaction between the moment of centralisation represented by the parties and the self-organised impulse from the movement which is the fundamental driving force of revolution. To sum up: First of all we cannot avoid the question of the state and political power. It is a delusion to believe we can avoid it. The critical question is who takes power and how. If it is simply a question of a party taking control of the existing state by whatever means, then it is absolutely true that will be a change that simply reproduces the existing relations of domination. But the conception of a self-organised working class seizing power to institute new forms of political organisation and state organisation along with all the other oppressed and exploited groups changes the question. Revolution then becomes a process of self-emancipation which starts here and now, in the way we organise resistance to capitalism, and culminates when we create a selforganised society, and capitalism and all the oppression associated with it becomes simply a bad memory.